Let LTE and quad-core apps processor battle begin

NEW YORK – As the Mobile World Congress raises its curtain next week in Barcelona, practically every mobile chip company is rushing to announce new smartphone ICs with the mobile industry’s two new “must-have features”: quad-core and LTE modem.

Of course, not all quad-cores are equal. LTE modems, too, come in different flavors. Every modem chip is at a different stage in operators’ certification processes, a hurdle that every chip vendor needs to clear before claiming a design win.

Aside from Qualcomm which detailed its Snapdragon 600 and 800 and announced it during International Consumer Electronics Show, and Broadcom which discussed last week what the company claims to be smallest 4G-LTE Advanced modem chip, both Nvidia and Marvell are competing for the market’s attention this week.

Nvidia unveiled Tuesday (Feb. 19) Tegra 4i, a new member of the Tegra 4 family. It’s an application processor integrated with LTE processor on the same die.

Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, called it a “stunner,” due to a number of advanced features integrated in it. The 4i is based on four Cortex-A9 (2.3-GHz) CPUs jointly developed with ARM, featuring a fifth “battery saver” core. It also comes with 60 GPU cores and a version of the i500 LTE modem optimized for integration.

Nvidia's senior vice president, Phillip Carmack, wrote in his blog at Nvidia’s website, “Tegra 4i will bring super phone capabilities to the mainstream smartphone market, and there will be nothing on the market like it.”